January 10, 2015

Carlos Saladrigas, The Huffington Post

On December 17, President Obama took bold actions to start unraveling one of the longest foreign-policy morasses in recent history. For nearly 55 years, we have kept in place a failed policy. In the early years of the Cuban revolution, we tried nearly everything to bring down the Cuban regime, including the imposition of sanctions, which over time became the most severe set of sanctions imposed on any foe.

If it wasn't always clear that regime change was the ultimate policy end, it became perfectly clear with the codification of sanctions under the Helms-Burton law that was passed in 1996, at a time when the once-powerful Soviet empire was collapsing all over the world.

It has been hard to understand how it is possible that the most powerful nation in the world tried and failed to topple a poor and ineffective government of a little island barely 90 miles from its shores. Excuses abound, but in the end, the economic incompetence of the Cuban government has been outdone by the strategic incompetence of the U.S. and its Cuban-American handlers in Miami...